Recently, the largest oil spill since BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster struck the Gulf of Mexico. Approximately 88,000 gallons of oil spilled out into the ocean, and even though Shell announced that the oil was not at risk of making its way to shore, one fact remains: the only way to combat climate change is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Solar is one way to get there. But until we can achieve solar grid parity, utility companies won’t want to switch to powering cities on renewable energy sources anytime soon — which is why the continued development and research of solar power is a necessary part of our future.

But what about other supplemental renewable energy sources? Solar panels aren’t our only resource: did you know that space lasers have been proposed as a means of efficiently gathering solar energy?

There are plenty of exciting renewable energy sources in development right now — and some of them are just plain weird. Which resource surprised you the most? Share the infographic and let us know in the comments!

Riversimple has a production prototype for a mass-marketable hydrogen-powered car, and an unconventional plan for how people will use it. The company is hoping to have the vehicles come to market by 2018, but real-world prototype testing is already underway on roads all over the UK.

The sleek, euro-futuristic design of Riversimple‘s new car, the Rasa, is the work of Chris Reitz, who is the former design chief for the Fiat 500. The car is named after the latin phrase “tabula rasa,” or the blank slate. It’s a nod to the uncharted territory that faces alternative-fuel vehicles as they move forward, and the new beginning that must come after the exhaustion of fossil fuels.

All-Inclusive Lease Plan

Riversimple doesn’t want you to buy the Rasa. Seems counterintuitive for a car company, but they’re focusing on selling long-term lease plans to consumers, which would include the car, all required maintenance, insurance, and all the hydrogen refills they’ll need. It would be a monthly subscription fee that would take much of the hassle out of car ownership.

Refills aren’t as simple as pulling up to the regular gas station, though, because there aren’t many places yet where you can top up a hydrogen tank. Riversimple is working on deals with partners in different areas to ensure enough supply in areas where their cars are being leased. They’re also asking people to sign up for their mailing list and provide their zip codes, so that they can best assess where refueling stations would be most needed. With a 300-mile range between fill-ups, though, owners wouldn’t be at the pump too often.

Impressive Engineering

Riversimple’s Rasa is a small two-seater vehicle made of extremely light and durable carbon-fiber composites. It’s the same material that Tesla Motors uses in some of its vehicles, because it’s a way get the strength of steel at a small fraction of the weight. The carbon-fiber composite chassis of the Rasa weighs only 40kg.

Image courtesy Riversimple

The vehicle is powered by an 8.5kW hydrogen fuel cell, and it can travel 300 miles before it needs a hydrogen refill. The fuel cell runs four electric motors – one at each wheel – to give the vehicle its thrust. Those motors mean that the Rasa has 4-wheel-drive, with each wheel under separate control.

The prototype version of the vehicle weighs only 580kg. It’s got a maximum speed of 60mph, so it’s not going to impress anyone on the Autobahn, but it’s an ideal concept for a suburban commuter car.

“Network Electric” Means Efficiency

In the Rasa’s hydrogen fuel cell, liquid hydrogen travels through a Proton Exchange Membrane to combine with oxygen. The chemical reaction that occurs when the two basic elements combine produces a surge of electricity, with a small amount of pure water created as a by-product. The electricity produced inside the chambers of the fuel cell then flows out to the small motors placed by each of the car’s four wheels, and those motors get the wheels moving.

It’s not easy to move a car. Overcoming the inertia of a stopped car is the most difficult part, because it requires a lot of energy. That kind of acceleration requires a large, high-output fuel cell, because every time the car brakes, the car’s kinetic energy is drained. The pressure of the brakes on the moving wheels turns the kinetic energy into heat, ant the fuel cell must be called upon again to move the car from point zero. The Rasa manages to get by quite well with a very compact fuel cell: the prototype vehicles have been zipping around in stop-and-start downtown London traffic without sacrificing much of their estimated 250 mpg fuel efficiency.

Image courtesy Riversimple

Riversimple’s secret to efficiency is that the engineering teams working on the Rasa’s design found a way to reclaim much of the energy that’s normally lost to braking. By routing it into a bank of super-capacitors, they can store much of the electricity and send it back to the wheels when the traffic light turns green again. They call it a “Network Electric” vehicle because the network of energy flow encompasses the whole car: energy is reclaimed from all four wheels, and can be sent back to them as needed to boost the car’s acceleration.

The Rasa’s super-capacitors are only a short-term solution, though. They can take in and store energy much faster than a battery can, which makes them perfect for collecting and distributing energy over short periods, but they can’t store the energy well. Still, with the capacitors mitigating up to 50% of the braking energy loss, the car’s efficiency is really remarkable.

Environmental Impact

The hydrogen fuel cell at the heart of the Rasa is nearly a zero-emissions system. Only water is created from the chemical reactions, unlike the long list of polluting by-products from gas combustion engines. But 95% of commercially-available hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which is a non-renewable fossil fuel.

Hydrogen can be made from electrolysis of water – splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen via the addition of electricity – but it’s an expensive and energy-hungry process. Hydrogen fuel cells are clean, but getting enough hydrogen to run them costs us in fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse emissions. Riversimple hopes to minimize that problem by forming partnerships with businesses already generating hydrogen as a byproduct of other processes, or via renewable energy sources.

Beta Testing

The car is still only a prototype, but more test vehicles will soon be in the hands of selected beta testers in the UK. They will be loaning out the car to 60-80 drivers for 3-6 month contracts to see how they work in the real world. Riversimple will be gathering data from the vehicles to assess fuel efficiency and performance, but they will also be collecting user feedback about the Rasa experience. They want to know about any technical problems, design preferences, and assess driver satisfaction with the vehicles. They’ve carefully selected a wide variety of individuals to cover as many different scenarios as possible: the car will be used by folks of different ages, in different settings, and some will even get heavy use as corporate and car-sharing vehicles.

Image courtesy Riversimple

It’s hard to say whether a small lightweight car that can’t get above 60mph will find much of a market in North America. In the US, the SUV is still king of the road, and sales of hybrid vehicles dip along with oil prices. But Riversimple hopes that the leasing model will make the Rasa attractive and affordable for anyone who’s interested in sustainability. Besides, there’s a whole global market to take advantage of.

United Airlines has taken the first step towards building a biofuel-powered fleet. New biofuel blends are being tested on short-run flights in hopes that they’ll prove to be a valuable tool to cutting airline carbon emissions worldwide.

United Airlines is leading the way in the use of renewable biofuels in passenger aircraft. They are currently testing a biofuel blend in their regular short-distance flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco. If the new hybrid fuel performs to their expectations, United has plans to expand biofuel use to all of their domestic flights that leave from Los Angeles.

American-Made Biofuel Blends

The biofuel blend they’re testing is sourced and produced in the United States, thanks to a 2014 deal between United Airlines and California-based Alt Air Fuels. Alt Air Fuels is a refiner of environmentally sustainable source materials, known as “feedstocks,” for production of jet and diesel fuels. Their refinery near Los Angeles will be providing United with up to 15 million gallons of refined biofuel over the next three years. That biofuel will be mixed with traditional jet fuel for a blend that’s 30% renewable biofuel and 70% traditional jet fuel.

In addition to the recent Alt Air agreement, United Airlines invested $30 million last year in Fulcrum BioEnergy, a company developing technologies for transforming municipal solid waste (regular household trash) into biofuel. That investment will help fund the construction of refineries near United Airways hub airports, and United will get a discounted rate on the aviation biofuel that Fulcrum produces.

United Airlines’ jets can’t run on 100% biofuel, because pure biofuels are incompatible with today’s jet engines. Unblended biofuels act as organic solvents and gradually dissolve flexible rubber hoses and gaskets over time. Blending biofuel with conventional petroleum-based fuels can prevent rubber erosion, which is why most companies testing biofuels for use in their vehicles are starting with low-percentage blends. If test runs of the current blends prove them to be efficient, cost-effective, and clean over the long run, it could lead to new aircraft engine designs that would accommodate higher percentages. After all, the fossil fuel supply will only last us so much longer before the transition is no longer a choice, but a necessity.

Alternative Fuels: For All Modes of Transportation

This isn’t the first time that Alt Air Fuels has signed a big US biofuel contract. They were recently in the news because of their agreement to supply the United States Navy with a special biofuel blend for their ships. The US Navy aims to reduce their carbon emissions and improve their energy security, and biofuels are part of their strategy. The Great Green Fleet, a carrier strike group, is the first wave of the US Navy’s exploration of American-made biofuels as a viable alternative to traditional diesel fuel. The blend being used by the military is slightly different: 10% of the fuel is derived from beef fat coming out of the American Midwest, and the remaining 90% is conventional diesel fuel.

Mixing renewable fuels with traditional ones isn’t new: we’ve had standards for renewable fuels in gasoline for several years, thanks to EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up emissions from the millions of cars on the roads. Renewable fuels make sense when faced with the unavoidable reality that oil is a finite and dwindling resource. Many cities have broken with diesel completely when it comes to their public transportation fleets. Biogas and biodiesel buses are slowly replacing older gas-guzzling models all over the world.

Unfortunately, airlines have been much slower to adapt to renewable fuels. Considering just how much fuel the industry uses, that’s going to have to change.

Reducing Air Travel’s Carbon Footprint

For a flightless species, humans sure enjoy flying. We fly a lot. According to statistics collected by the United States Department of Transportation, 696 million people boarded a plane in a United States airport in 2015. And that’s only counting flights that originated in US airports; flights returning to the US from other countries don’t even contribute to that staggering number.

All this flying around is convenient– some would say necessary – for business and vacation travel, but convenience comes at a cost. It takes literal tons of fuel to carry passengers back and forth. It adds up quickly: in 2015, the major American air carriers, combined, used 16,729.6 million gallons of fuel to transport passengers on domestic flights. Air freight transport burned hundreds of millions more gallons of fuel on top of that. Clearly, air travel is stomping out a massive carbon footprint every day.

That’s why this biofuel test project from United Airlines is so vitally important, and why we’ll be watching it closely to see what happens. Even though United Airlines is only the fourth largest airline in the United States by market share, handling approximately 15% of all domestic flights, it still accounts for tens of millions of gallons of fuel annually. Any dent that can be made in that number by replacing it with biofuels is a solid win for renewable fuels.

The success of this project will be especially encouraging, because air travel has been one of the more difficult sectors to adapt to the integration of renewable and alternative fuels. While it’s relatively easy to use solar power and electricity to power smaller vehicles like cars and buses, the energy requirements of commercial jets are just too much for battery power to handle. Not to mention the extra weight associated with carrying batteries around. In an era when carryon sizes and weights are continually shrinking to cut the airline’s fuel costs, the weight allowance that would need to be dedicated to energy storage systems is financially inconceivable.

Maybe in the future, battery-powered commercial aircraft will be crisscrossing the sky on short hops between neighboring states. We’ve already seen a battery-powered flight from France to England over the English Channel, so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility to imagine electric airplanes shuttling folks between Boston and New York. But it’s more realistic to expect biofuel blends to take up the challenge when it comes to renewables in the skies.

A group out of Purdue University is working towards making battery anodes out of renewable, easy-to-source pollen. Talk about green energy!

Energy storage is a hot topic. As great as renewable energies are, unless there’s a good way to store power and take it on the road with you, their uses can be limited. Research into battery technologies is occurring at a breakneck pace, with laboratories everywhere trying to find ways to make batteries smaller, lighter, cheaper, and cleaner.

The battery-related research coming out of Purdue University’s School of Chemical Engineering is a little unconventional, but some of the best scientific breakthroughs come from thinking outside the box. Associate professor Vilas Pol and doctoral student Jialiang Tang have been looking into the use of plant pollen as a component of batteries. It’s an abundantly available material, after all, and it’s completely renewable, with a new batch ready to collect every time flowers bloom (just ask anyone who suffers from seasonal allergies – the stuff is everywhere).

Complexity is Key

Pol and Tang’s research focuses on the use of pollen grains as the anode portion of a lithium-ion battery, instead of the minuscule irregular graphite particles that are the current standard. By treating the pollen to very high temperatures in an argon atmosphere, they char the pollen completely, leaving behind pure carbon particles that retain the shape of the original pollen grains.

Pollen grains are incredibly complex when viewed under a microscope. Their microstructure of spikes and crevices and pits allows them to do their job of sticking to bees and other insects, who will carry them around to pollinate other plants. The Purdue research is looking into a possible untapped use for that microstructure: a highly irregular surface means a very high surface area, which is a necessity for an efficient anode.

By charring the pollen into pure carbon, they’re creating a renewable and easy-to-get replacement for graphite particles. A secondary heat-treatment process helps to open up pores in the 3-dimensional grains, allowing for even more ion storage – which means more energy storage.

The research team tested two sources of pollen for their anodes. They tried cattail pollen, which is uniform since it all comes from one source. They also tried using bee pollen, which is a complex assortment of pollens from different plants that the bees have visited. Initial tests showed that the cattail pollen worked more efficiently than the mixture, but there are literally thousands of other possible sources of pollen to test out, and it’s possible that other shapes will perform even better.

The research is very promising so far. It looks like the experimental pollen anode is capable of reaching a full charge after 10 hours, but reached half of its potential capacity after only one hour. They tested the pollen anodes under several different conditions to replicate different real-world environments where the batteries might be used, and they performed well in all cases.

So far, the tests have only been run on an isolated anode and not in a full battery system, so there’s still work to be done in sniffing out the details to make it to market.

The research was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports on February 5th.

The study looked at both thermal power stations (that depend on the combustion of fossil fuels, biomass or uranium), and also at hydropower systems.

Hydropower relies directly on abundant flow in falling water from mountain snow melt, while each type of thermal energy requires a lot of water to boil to make steam to drive turbines, and water to cool off the boiled water as it is discharged.

Unlike solar PV and wind power, thermal electric power stations are totally dependent on adequate water supplies, at cool water temperatures

The study assesses how much global power generation will be at risk by 2050 under two alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, one in which temperatures are able to be kept under 2 degrees C, and the other in which they continue to increase at current rates to a 2.5°C to a 5°C degree world.

The estimates in the study are based on an assumption that 80% of the world’s electricity is generated thermally – coal, gas, nuclear, biomass – with an additional 17% generated using hydropower. (Only 3% of global energy comes from PV and wind, according to the study*.)

(*The figures originated from a 2009 paper from the IEA – so it’s based on 2008 data. The IEA has been fairly notorious for undercounting renewables for some time, as the adoption rate has increased exponentially, so in the future, it is unlikely that 80% will still be thermal.)

As of now, however, of all water taken from rivers and lakes; the percentage used in thermal power generation amounts to about 50% in the UK and about 40% in the US.

With so much electricity generation so dependent on water, the study shows just how vulnerable is the world’s combustion-based energy supply in a hotter, drier world, when water will be warmer and droughts and heat waves longer and more frequent in many regions.

The paper is one of several that look at the impact of a hotter climate on thermal electricity generation, between coal, gas, biomass and nuclear. Two more quantify the effects on electricity costs.

As Californians have just experienced, hotter temperatures have already begun to result in the droughts long predicted for the entire Southwest US by climate scientists as the 21st century continues to warm.

What California has just seen is that when droughts deepen, mountain reservoirs and lakes and rivers dry up, and hydropower dries up with them.

A Pacifica Institute study quantified the costs as California’s hydropower declined, raising average electricity prices as a result – by $3 billion.

The hydropower shortfall was replaced with gas, which is not only more expensive than hydropower, but also more polluting

“Assuming the marginal costs for electricity during the 2007-2009 drought were approximately the same as between the 2012 and 2015 water years, the full additional costs to California electricity customers of seven years of drought were a reduction of 85,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of hydroelectricity and an increased cost exceeding $3 billion,” said the report’s author, Pacific Institute President, Yale hydro-climatologist Peter Gleick.

How thermal power is reduced as water temperatures increase:

The changes that higher temperatures bring not only deplete water flow, impacting hydropower, but also act to warm the water that is needed to cool discharged water from thermal power plants. This warmer water, both in rivers and the ocean, also reduces electricity production.

Because of rules governing environmental degradation, thermal plants that essentially boil water must shut down if the water used for cooling gets too warm.

Discharged water temperature is monitored to ensure that coal and nuclear plants don’t discharge water that is too hot, endangering wildlife in surrounding waterways.

During the heat wave in Europe in 2003 and 2006; 17 nuclear plants across Germany, France, Spain and Romania had to idle production or shut down entirely because the waterways normally used to cool down boiled water coming out of the electricity plants was too warm to discharge hot water into.

Shutting down or idling plants reduces generation and raises electricity prices because the lowered output of electricity results in higher prices per unit of generation

Paper assesses global costs of thermal generation in a hotter water future

The study co-author Øivind Anti Nilsen estimated that even as little as a one degree rise in average river temperatures will result in almost a 4% percent increase in electricity prices, over the course of a week.

“The analysis shows that higher temperatures lead to reduced production in power plants and hence higher electricity costs. Prices shoot up”, explained Nilsen, a co-author of the paper, and professor at the Department of Economics at Norges Handelshøyskole.

“The higher the temperature, the lower the power plant’s efficiency. Prices therefore rise in line with the temperature,” said Nilsen

These increasing costs of climate change will be felt in the US as much as in Europe, because in the US, the thermal energy industry accounts for as much as 40% of all freshwater withdrawals, according to the US Department of Energy

This effect will only continue to increase in the future, as the world sees more frequent and hotter heat waves. Yet the world continues to build thermal plants that are dependent on a diminishing resource – cool water.

The Arabian Gulf region already has one of the highest ocean temperatures in the world, reaching above 95°F in the summer. Despite this inability to act as a cooling resource, the Arabian Gulf is to provide the cooling for two proposed nuclear plants, a 1 GW nuclear plant from a Russian manufacturer, and another much larger one, comprising four adjoined 1.4 GW units, that is made in Korea.

Embedding haptic signals into a gas pedal just might be the next big step forward in driver-controlled fuel efficiency. With this tool helping the car and driver to work together to use as little fuel as possible, we could see up to a 7% reduction in fuel use, on average.

Bosch, recognizing that up to a quarter of fuel consumption is controlled by the driver, has developed an intuitive and responsive gas pedal that acts as an “active and connected assistant” to the driver. It’s connected to the drivetrain, communicates with the navigation system, and receives up-to-the-minute traffic data from the cloud, and it vibrates to tell a driver when to ease up on the gas. As the Bosch website says, the haptic pedal’s helpful reminders are “given precisely where it can be carried out virtually as a reflex – directly at the foot.”

When car manufacturers began putting fuel-use indicators in the dashboard displays of their fuel-efficient cars, it trained drivers to respond to the real-time feedback of the MPG indicator as though they were playing a video game. The cars, many of them hybrid vehicles, were already designed to be fuel efficient, but there’s only so much a manufacturer can do. Too many external factors contribute to MPG, most of them completely outside of the manufacturer’s control. Road conditions, traffic, and driving style all play into how close the car’s fuel efficiency will match the big number that the manufacturer is advertising on TV.

Playing the Efficiency Game

The little LCD display showing a driver the vehicle’s fuel-efficiency in real-time has been teaching drivers to play the efficiency game and improve their driving. By watching and learning what behaviors tend to throw the indicator into the red, and avoiding them, drivers can get more mileage, but they don’t feel as thought they’re putting any effort in – it’s as though they’re immersed in a very real video game. It’s hard (and dangerous) to spend your whole drive watching a screen, though, so Bosch came up with the idea of the haptic gas pedal as a way to deliver gentle reminders to drivers who’ve reverted to their gas-wasting ways.

Image courtesy of Bosch

The pedal is equipped to deliver a variety of warning signals to the driver via different types of haptic signals, including vibration, knocking, and counter pressure, which vary in intensity depending on the importance of the message. It can signal when it’s time to switch from the battery to the internal combustion engine in a hybrid vehicle, and it can shift gears and tell a driver to coast when traffic allows it.

With constant feedback, the goal is to improve both safety and fuel efficiency by helping the driver to do what’s best in any given instant on the road. Because the pedal is also connected to the vehicle’s on-board GPS module and to real-time traffic data, it can warn a driver about stopped traffic ahead, or signal that the driver has turned the wrong way down a one-way street.

Harvard researchers are perfecting methods to collect water from the air via dropwise condensation so that not one precious drop gets away from us.

Water is critical to life on Earth, and is in increasingly short supply as demand rises. Dropwise condensation is a way to draw water directly from air without needing to wait for rain. It happens when moist air meets a dry surface and collects into small droplets which drip off when they become large enough. Condensation is a critical part of the desalination process, and it’s important in air conditioners and distillation towers, but it’s also a way to collect water in arid regions.

Water collection nets are already used in some areas of the world, notably in the Chile, where fog gathers along the Andean slopes due to the particular climate and geography of the area.

In their most basic form, these nets are a woven fabric mesh strung up between two poles: as the fog passes through the net, it leaves behind tiny droplets of condensation, which drip down into a collection channel before being routed to a cistern for storage. A net is used because it’s a simple way to increase the surface area, but many industrial applications of dropwise condensation need the water to condense on solid surfaces.

A research team, led by Kyoo-Chul Park of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, decided to tackle the problem. Many desert creatures have developed ways to collect tiny amounts of water at every opportunity. The Namib beetle is one such creature, and it survives in an extremely arid area by having a textured carapace that invites much more condensation than a flat shell could.

In an article published in Nature in March 2016, the researchers described their use of materials inspired by the natural world to most efficiently collect and transport water droplets. They needed to find the delicate balance between surface area for condensation, and smooth surfaces for transportation of the drops into a collection channel. Some nanoscale, and even molecular-scale, surfaces have an astonishingly large surface area for condensation, but those surfaces don’t allow the droplets to coalesce into larger drops that can run off and be collected.

Park and the Harvard team looked to nature for a solution. First, they created a surface made of hundreds of millimeter-sized bumps, similar to the beetle’s shell. They improved on the bump shape after analyzing how water collected on them: their final design has asymmetrical bumps that widen at the base to allow for more efficient runoff via gravity. They then covered the structure with a slick coating inspired by the waxy inner walls of the pitcher plant. The plant uses the wax to keep its victims from crawling back to safety once they’ve fallen into the pitcher-shaped flower where they’ll eventually be digested. It’s a perfect material for use in water collection – millimeter-sized bumps covered in the “pitcher-plant-inspired nanocoating” creates a collection surface that excels both at collecting water, and at coalescing and channeling it away for collection.

Their research could lead to improved efficiency in the industrial processes that depend on condensation, but there’s also a chance their work could be adapted for fog collection, giving greater water security to tens of thousands of people.